Thursday, November 30, 2006

The hair pulling of technology

Its like some insane twisted version of dominos.

Mom and I got a scanner for dad so he could scan in his fading collection of family photos, negatives and slides some going back to the old farmstead my grandpa kept in Kansas.

But the scanner required a 233mhz or better computer which the install software from Hewlett-pukerd insisted his computer wasn't, even though it was.

So I went and bought a used IBM 933mhz netvista computer via ebay from a nice place, the blind center of Nevada, cheap at that. It was sold as is, the harddrive wiped and no restore disk. No biggie, I installed an old version of windows98 I had on it.

But it was too new a computer and a bunch of the drivers were missing from the win98 disk. So I spent the day digging for drivers, finally finding that IBM had a driver installation utility available online. (a small blessing, thank you ibm)

But the diagnostic utility required the .net framework installed from microsoft. So I tried to download and installed the .net framework.

Which then would not install without Internet Explorer 6.0 or better installed first. So I am now downloading that and waiting for it to install.

God! F*^&%^^%# &*&&^%%$$ damnit. Dad calls it my refresher course in frustration. We got a good chuckle out of that.

Now I'll go back after IE6 is installed and install .net framework then install the driver utility and then finally get all the drivers and software he needs to make this computer work so that I can finally install the new scanner and he can start saving this rapidly decomposing treasury of family history.

Technology aint all its cooked up to be. No wonder I dropped out of software to run a hoe or tractor. Nobody ever had to debug a hoe and the only thing you have to update on a tractor is the oil and the tires.

1 comment:

Rae Ann said...

You're much more tech savvy than I am. I'd have given up already. lol And, you know, I've never had much luck with scanners. Maybe I've burnt them out or something, but they rarely last more than year. (and I still have bunches of old photos left to scan) I hope it all finally works out! Oh, and this hoe sometimes gets as out of whack as a computer. ;-)